IT service management is widely practiced in organizations and administrations, wherein enormous amount of knowledge is utilized for analysis and resolution of problems arising in routine service and support work. The service and support industries are executing voluminous service operations on day-to-day basis. The service operations enable efficient and effective provision of the IT services across the organization. The service operations comprises monitoring services, resolving issues, fulfilling customer requests and carrying out various operational tasks. The service operations are associated with different technologies and involve use of variety of technical tools and resources.
Conventionally, the knowledge used for execution of service operations is mostly available in the software systems in stored forms or available with human resources in tacit form. This knowledge available with the human resources and software systems needs to be converted into structured, complete, executable and reusable form. Knowledge capturing through crowd sourcing exposes to a potential risk of non-uniformity in the knowledge captured for similar technologies. The non-uniformity of the knowledge so captured further results in difficulty in abstracting the knowledge for similar technologies.
Further, the knowledge captured by various means comprises variety of service catalogues containing service operations, wherein currently the service operations are authored manually. The service operations authored manually are inherently prone to many drawbacks such as incompleteness, inaccuracy, and inconsistency. Analogous service operations, authored manually, may have non-similar implementations. Further, the service operations which are incomplete, and inaccurate, and inconsistent further mainly result in hampering system performance while execution. Further, manual authoring of service operations result in consuming heavy system cycle time while validating the service operations, hence costly to maintain. Further, population of manually authored service operations is a current method used for service operation implementations. Currently, the service operations implementations are authored manually and stored in the systems. The manual authoring and validation of such service operations consumes substantial system cycles and man hours. Further, major technical problem with such service operation implementation is that such service operation implementations could be incomplete wherein many times necessary steps are missing, or these service operations may be incorrect wherein wrong steps may be coded. Further, these service operation implementations may be inconsistent wherein similar service operations have non-similar implementations.
The technical problem associated with the manually authored service operations are explained in detail herein. For example, consider a hierarchy of infrastructure elements as OS→User. Then for ‘Create User’ Service Operation, correct implementation is: 1) Check OS 2) If OS exists, Check User, else Eject 3) If User does not exists, Create User, else Eject 4) If User is created successfully, Check User, else Eject 5) If User exists, Resolved, else Eject. But in manually authored service operations, it may be possible that any of the above steps or sub steps are missing. For instance pre check of user and all eject statements are skipped, i.e. the service operation may be written as—1) Check OS 2) If OS exists, Create User 3) If User is created successfully, Check User 4) If User exists, Resolved. Hence, this results in incomplete service operation.
Further, in another example, the service operation is ‘Check OS’. The required service operation should be as followed: 1) If OS exists, Check User 2) If User does not exists, Create User 3) If User is created successfully, Check User 4) If User exists, Resolved. But, due to human mistake, the service operation may be written as: 1) Check OS 2) If OS exists, Check User 3) If User exists, Create User 4) If User is created successfully, Check User 5) If User does not exists, Resolved. Hence, manual authoring of service operation results in incorrect service operation.
Another major technical problem with the present art is storing of the manually authored service operation implementations which is consuming major memory space and maintenance of those stored service operations is time consuming and costly. Further, there is a hidden threat of security to the stored service operations that someone may steal, change or destroy the knowledge lying in the service operations when in stored form.